Half the work of man for the next one hundred years will be to kill the lies told about what God has done.
Whether there is in all the vast universe a higher and nobler being than man, I don't know. Whether there is in all the vast universe a better place for man to live than on this earth, I don't know. And no one knows any more about these matters than I do.
We have found out much that is not so; now we want to find out all we can that is so. And it is of no use to go to the Church to learn anything. The Church is only a place where falsehoods are kept in cold storage. The man who thinks and studies is the man who is helping the world most, not the man who preaches and prays. To find the truth one needs to get as far from the Church as possible.
Christians of all denominations have lots of pity for the man without a church. Let me assure these persons that the man without a church doesn't want one. As a rule, he is satisfied with what he has. He has a home, which is better than a church. If those persons who are pitying men and women for not having a church would, instead, pity the man without a home, and pity him enough to help him get one, they would show much better sense and manifest a truer sympathy with their fellow-beings.
I can not see any good in painting a thing white that is black, or calling a thing beautiful that is ugly. There are persons who talk as though they believed that a Northeast storm was sunshine. I am not made that way. I am as ready and as willing as anybody to acknowledge the good in Nature, or the good in life, but I do not believe in lying, in saying that wrong is right, or that suffering is to be enjoyed. There are lots of hard things in our life, and it does not alter facts to call them by some other name. A man dying with a cancer can not be made to believe that he is having a good time.
The most that any man can do who goes through this earthly existence is to use his fellow-mortals right and square; to give them an honest day's work when he works for them and an honest day's pay when he hires them; to say nothing to hurt them and everything he can to assist them; to help them out of trouble and not get them into trouble. If one does this, and does no more than this, he has done what beats every religion on earth.
We have got to deal with men and women as they are and where they are. The man who is natural; the man who has not been made a fool of by a priest or parson; the man who has not swapped his commonsense for a foolish belief; the man who has not had his mind stuffed with religious dope, knows that this life on earth is the important life, and that it is a higher work to determine his fate here than anywhere else.
There is not a person living who would not be well and strong and happy here rather than hereafter. I would rather have the power to make every cripple straight and whole; every poor, unfortunate man and woman prosperous and contented; every sick person well, every bad person good, and every slave to vice master of his appetite and passions, in this life on earth, than to save the human wrecks, the human unfortunates, the human victims of vice and crime, for another life somewhere else.